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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Is there a more socially unproductive, legit practice than this?

This is an article about how pension funds and other large players use algorithms to reduce their trading costs. You have a problem with that? Or did you not know you were in a Wendy's?

Yeah that’s maybe an edge case at best. It’s nickel vacuuming in most instances.

One of the largest uses of algorithmic trading is not an edge case.

Many things, I'd argue. Meat industry causing animal suffering. Social media, tobacco, fast food industries causing human suffering. Oil and gas industry causing environmental destruction.

What direct suffering does algorithmic trading cause? It would take quite the narrative spin to argue that it's as bad or worse as one of the above industries.

You are syphoning revenue from a diverse cast of multi-ethnic CEO's that could use that revenue to enrich their communities.

They won't, but they could. They totally could, and you are ruining that possibility.

This is such weird commentary that pops up on every algotrading post. Why does it have to be socially productive? No one makes the claim it is.

It’s parasitic.

You can buy or sell 1 share of apple for a bid/ask spread of 1 cent today, or 0.006% of the stock price, and pay no commission to do so. There are very few other examples out there where pure competition between market participants have made things so cheap as to be indiscernible from free.

Parasites indeed

Okay, and is that bad? The entire world has systems which parasitic relationships exist that if they simply did not the entire ecosystem of live could collapse.

But here we are with 26 letters complaining on perhaps the most advanced thing humans have made because you don’t see the value of saving some money while trading.

People don’t exist to give things a way, expecting people to pay more is parasitic.

In theory it is not socially unproductive at all (in practice much less so).

The socially useful idea behind trading is allocation of capital. How do we determine which sectors get capital and which don't? How do we determine a price of something?

This is in theory. In practice of course... BitConnect!

Hmm, for-profit prisons?

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